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Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Animals and Alternatives in Testing: History, Science, and Ethics

Joanne Zurlo, Deborah Rudacille, and Alan M. Goldberg

Appendix C: Timeline of Tissue Culture

1801	Bichat investigates and names the tissues of the body and stresses the study of the different tissues that make up the organs.
1856	Ludwig maintains animal organs alive outside the body by pumping blood through them.
1885	Roux removes a portion of the medullary plate of a chick embryo and maintains it in a warm saline solution for a few days.
1907	Harrison demonstrates the in vitro growth of living animal tissue by explanting a fragment of nerve cord from a frog tadpole and placing it in a drop of frog lymph. Within hours nerve fibers begin to sprout from the cells in the cord.
1911-12	Burrows and Carrell succeed in growing explants from adult dogs, cats, rats, and guinea pigs and also in growing malignant tissues. Carrell begins a cell line, taken from the heart of a chick embryo, which is propagated by Albert H. Ebeling for 34 years. Ebeling uses the culture to test toxicity of germicides.
1913	Steinhardt, Israeli, and Lambert show that vaccinia virus can survive for several weeks in fragments of rabbit cornea.
1914	David Thompson begins to experiment with organ culture, explanting toes, feather germs, optic lens, and tail bud from embryonic chicks.
1922	Ebeling succeeds in culturing epithelial cells.
1923	Warburg develops a method of studying respiration in thin slices of tissue.
1925	Parker and Nye inoculate fragments of rabbit testes with vaccinia virus and cultivate them in plasma.
1929	Fell studies the development of bones and joints in vitro using fragments of developing organs from chick embryos.
1931	Goodpasture and associates note the possibilities for research and practical application in the use of developing chick embryos. Use of the chorioallantoic-membrane technique for the study of fowl-pox virus is described.
1946	Beveridge and Burnet describe the cultivation of viruses and rickettsiae in the chick embryo.
1947	The Tissue Culture Conference held at Hershey, Pennsylvania initiates the founding of the American Tissue Culture Association. Enders, Weller, and Robbins grow mump viruses in chick tissue using penicillin to prevent bacterial contamination.
1948	Enders, Weller, and Robbins prove that poliomyelitis virus can be cultivated in vitro in the absence of nerve tissue. Sanford, Earle, and Likely establish clone cultures from single cells.
1954	Pomerat and Leake propose the use of tissue culture for toxicity studies.
1958	Harriss induces hybridization of cells on a large scale, with cells of widely different species as well as cells of widely differing types in the same species.